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New discrimination provisions

The main provisions of the Equality Act 2010 are due to come into force in October of this year. The Act deals with a wide range of equality and discrimination issues. One aspect of the Act of interest to local authorities is its reversal of the House of Lord’s judgment in Lewisham London Borough Council v Malcolm (2008). In that case a council flat tenant suffered from schizophrenia, which counts as a disability. He sub-let his flat and the council evicted him. He claimed his illness had caused him to sub-let and the council had discriminated against him by evicting him. The court held that as the council would have evicted an able-bodied tenant who had sub-let, it had not treated the disabled tenant any differently and therefore there had been no discrimination. The new Act reverses this by stating that a person who manages premises (such as a landlord) must not discriminate against a person by evicting him. Discrimination against a disabled person is defined as treating the person “unfavourably because of something arising in consequence of the person’s disability”. Discrimination will not arise if the landlord can show it did not know and could not reasonably have been expected to know of the disabled person’s disability.

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